


Brevity

by f3tid



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: 1754, A thousand years in the making and counting, AC3, America, Ass Creed, Colonial era, F/M, Historical, Kenway - Freeform, Prelude, Ziio - Freeform, brevity, something like a romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-15
Updated: 2012-11-15
Packaged: 2017-12-13 06:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/821108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/f3tid/pseuds/f3tid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"My only fault was that I was ambitious and wholly unrepentant for it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Flesh Wounds

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** This is one of my longer stories that's in the works. I figured that it might be a good idea to start uploading chapters of Brevity in addition to whatever I post here because this is a fairly good representation of my ability, not to mention my procrastination. Thoughts are more than welcome and always appreciated. I'll let the chapters trickle in over the next few days. Thanks very much.
> 
> **Disclaimer:** All of the following characters belong to Ubisoft. I neither own, nor claim ownership of anything referenced or utilized in the following.

Whatever phantom compulsion it was that guided my steps that horrid torrential morning would not be denied nor delayed. I lacked reason or excuse for my endeavors, of that I was only vaguely aware, as I traversed the precarious white plateau of the countryside on horseback. The poor beast brayed desperately for relief of my incessant command as I coerced him forthwith into the tumultuously abstract face of the nearest pike, but still I jerked my heels and slowly we contended the geographical leviathan. I had long since been deprived of sensation throughout the entirety of my body, and was tragically growing accustomed to the numbness of my skin, of the disconcerting dullness of my complexion when subjected to the cold of the American frontier. I tried to ignore the pleading whisper redolent in some cavernous nook of my mind that advised I turn back for Boston. I had already gone too far.

I couldn’t easily identify the innate desire that drew me and my steed up the cliffside that dawn, only that I was conscious of its presence, no matter how inconvenient or confounding. I’d have denied it, but I knew for certain it was that woman. She hadn’t summoned me and certainly would not, under any concurrent circumstances, and that fact alone motivated my drastic attempt at initiative. There wasn’t an iota of personal gratification to be garnered from rising before the sun and scaling the side of a blizzard wrought mountain, and my awareness of my own absurdity only frustrated and impassioned me ever more.

I cinched my jaw and grimaced as my teeth gnashed crudely against one another, coiling my unfeeling fingers around the chafing reins constraining the pinto’s pleading jowls. I empathized silently with the stallion, and chided myself for the force I exerted with a stiff tug of my arms. Nevertheless, we absconded what had to have been miles of unforgivingly frozen and jagged rock and dunes of multiple feet of snow, being pelted violently with sleet and plagued by frigid gales thrashing carnally about, directionless. I was more gracious, I think, than ever I had been before when we approached the peak and the terrain began to level. 

The vengeful caterwaul of the icy maelstrom receded slightly as I spurred my horse through the white ravaged timberland, my eyes keenly scouring the immediate topography for any signs of settlement. My efforts were rewarded only with disparagingly dense fog and an abundance of precipitation, as I had anticipated. Every inch of my incrementally suffering flesh supplicated that I abandon the ill-conceived expedition and take shelter a few miles in precedence, but my incorrigible stubbornness disallowed the thought to sully my mind for even an instant. Onward, we stalked.

Time collapsed and transmuted itself meaninglessly behind my eyelids with every blink or extensive period of dormancy. My skin was parched, injured and bleeding in a number of particularly exposed regions, my face for certain. I was no longer reminded of the ardor I was imposing upon my mount with every footfall of his mighty hoof, as the anxious and miserable cries perished with the upturn of the wind. I remained vigilant, despite the improbability of fair fortune, and cursed my heart for its unmistakable missteps whenever the thought of the woman resurfaced from the depths of my restless mind. Somewhere between the rural outskirts of Boston and this damned mountaintop, I had fabricated that my intentions were purely strategic in nature – regarding the skeletal plan of attack we’d all dreamed up only days before. I was a rather shoddy liar, but even in my haste, I had myself convinced.

How many seconds, minutes, hours, or combination of the lot elapsed before I was finally roused from my autonomous stupor, I hadn’t an inkling. All I knew, in that infinitesimal moment of clarity and consciousness, was that the voice that called accusingly out into the frothy ether of the tempest belonged to her. I wasn’t any less of an impetuous and inconstant man for what I’d done, but the contentment that soon set alight my entrails and incited a fractured grin to my certainly wounded visage curiously made it all inane. I loosened my vice grip on the reins and peered imploringly into the snow as the unintelligible contralto cries grew louder, more comprehensible. 

“Come no closer,” I managed to decipher from the obtrusive ambiance of the storm, then suddenly, “Kenway?” 

She was near. I found it frightfully instinctive to subdue myself, and thusly pressed my lips into a firm and tepid line, though the drum of my heart fell out of measure as she approached me. She was enshrouded in the burnished hide of a mammoth beast slain – a grizzly, I gathered – and held a gentle hand over her eyes like a visor against the snowfall. Each step she took required that she protract either of her gangly bronze legs out of the ground and plunge back in, consumed to the hip in unimaginable cold. Still, she advanced.

She poised a hand upon my horse’s muzzle and gazed up at me with distant tawny eyes. “I thought you would be gone from here.”

“It was my intent to review the map.” I lied, and made victims of us both.

Her typically rather harsh brow pinched slightly in rejoinder, ascribable either to linguistic misunderstanding or the ridiculousness of my request and the perils withstood to fulfill it. She always seemed to have a pensive quality, though, regardless of expression or sentiment. The young woman slipped her hand from the steed’s convulsing nostrils and along the bridle, tugging it free of my fingers and taking them into her own. She set a manageable pace for the direction in which she had emerged from the haze, but I interrupted her before she had fully submerged her foot into the snow. I pressed my gloved fingertips against the croup of the fatigued creature and exerted a great deal of my handicapped strength into dismounting it, taking gauchely to my feet in the inhospitable thickness of the snow.

“Zi-Ziio, you needn’t escort the both of us that way. Here, I can walk.” I uneasily assured her as we fell into step. My gait, being significantly loftier, proffered advantage over her diminutive stature, but I tailored my steps to better accommodate her.

“The camp is not far.” She replied, glancing first to me and then to the stallion ambling in her wake. After a few moments of pervasive whispers of the wind, she returned her passive eyes to my frame once more, apprehension knotting her brows. “Your horse is exhausted.”  
I chuckled haplessly, glancing down at my hands as they coddled one another in vain. “As am I. I pushed him too far this morning, I’m afraid.”  
I felt her exploratory gaze scour my person, and coughed against the residual restriction of my throat. Abandoning the short-lived effort of coaxing the sensation back into my fingers, I relocated my hands, one instinctively to the hilt of my sword peering from the brim of its sheath and the other along the nape of my neck. I glanced abruptly to my flank, purposelessly surveying the otherwise undisturbed white coated coppices for fear that my eye would wander to meet that of the woman beside me. I had executed all that she had asked of me over the tumultuous course of our association and gained her allegiance, but little else. She never claimed to trust me and, though I knew better, I expected it.

“It was unwise to make that journey alone,” she said some time later, and I could hear the smile manipulating her ample lips purely by the jaunty inflection of her voice. “Especially without something to protect your face from the wind.”

“Am I amusing you?”

I absentmindedly relegated my fingers to my cheek, still naught for sensation, and promptly recoiled from it with a hiss. The flesh there seared under the ginger touch of my buckskin glove long after I’d cordially retracted my hand and I festered quietly for a few moments, listening vacantly to the reverberation of Ziio’s laughter. After the endearingly girlish carousal diminished, the breeze drove my gaze to her, and my mouth roused into a weak smile. She did not look at me for a short while as she allowed her eyes to lie dormant, the specter of her snickering hinging a simper of her own upon her lips. I was quite abruptly set at ease.

She stirred to awareness with a lingering languor, and immediately she met my eyes. The humor had fled, but the vitality remained. “I can attend to you once we reach the camp, do not fret.”

I found it increasingly difficult to divert my attention. “I would greatly appreciate it, thank you.”  
We did not exchange many words for the remainder of our trek through the brush, and those that we did were sparse and conversational. Though I hadn’t a proclivity for pleasantries, something about her – this astute and remarkably adept native – only further enveloped me in her irrevocable gravity. My stare had taken shelter in her countenance, my smile contingent upon the infrequent glint of the sun against her flesh and my heart palpitating with every glimpse of her austere eyes in my nebulous direction. Even as I sidled by inches with the sole intent of being beside her, I was assured of my innocence. I was there for the map, and nothing more.

The musky scent of burning mosses and sequoia fibers pervaded the frigid air cavorted about us in the clearing we had approached, and Ziio confirmed my unspoken presumption with a nod. She flicked her tongue deftly against her teeth and produced a sound that incepted sport in the horse tethered to her steady hand. They trotted on in tandem through the throng of tree trunks and frosty thickets of greenery and I tailed closely behind. The rhythmic and spirituous murmur of buckskin doldrums flooded the small ring of tents and makeshift shanties occupying the space before us, unscathed by the blizzard due to the dense canopy overhead and clamorous otherwise with sounds of construction, talk, and the remote din of community. 

To my astonishment and chagrin, the camp carried on with the nonchalance of civilization and functionality. It did not misrepresent the base chores of routine in Boston, with men toiling away with tools – no matter how crude, women dressing game for preparation and crafting items of pragmatism. There was rationale, a structure unrehearsed, and society amongst those people. I had never heard or witnessed anything of its kind, especially regarding the natives. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I was intruding upon a private paradigm, very much disparate from myself and others like me.

“Are you coming?” resounded Ziio’s rhetoric from a few paces away. 

I felt the flesh crease on my forehead as I cast my attention to her, brows reeled upward in surprise. She continued along the outskirts of the encampment, towing my horse along behind us as I reached her within a matter of steps. She glanced almost expectantly up at me as my presence disrupted her seclusion, perhaps sensing my awe.

“This is your village, then?” I posed my query guardedly.

She shook her head with a modest chortle, unlike the bout of laughter she had succumbed to en route. A smirk teased my lips ever still. “No, no. Kanien’keha:ka is very far from here. This place is only temporary until we begin the assault on Braddock’s battalion. Most of us are slave refugees. Others have been scorned by him and seek only retribution for what they have lost.”

“Surely your people will join you when we do make our move.”

“I will not ask anything of them that I can do myself.” And she was cold again. 

The woman had since released my steed and allowed him to canter idly only after she caressed the grove of his chin and grazed her forehead tenderly against his muzzle. She dallied not in watching the mighty creature traipse about, and instead pinched the fabric of my ulster betwixt her thumb and forefinger, guiding me by the arm into the aperture of a nearby thatched roof lean-to. I bowed my spine and shrunk into my shoulders to avoid a collision with the wooden beam impressed into the hut’s frame. She released me while I assessed the state of her dwelling with a probative eye, one hand relieving me of my tricorn hat out of autonomous courtesy.

Ziio took to her haunches in the center of the room, cupping her hands about her lips and channeling air betwixt them with the objective of eliciting a sizeable flame from the rudimentary hearth before her. I wrinkled my nose as the arid fumes of smoke captivated the hut, but was thankful for the warm glow of the pyre that exuded soon thereafter. She gradually rose to her feet and shed the downy cape drawn across the slight slope of her shoulders and allowed it to pool on the earth beneath her.

“Thank you,” I rasped solemnly as I drew nearer to the fire and withdrew my hands from their deerskin cloaks.

She disappeared into an indiscriminant corner of the hovel and I heard her maneuvering at a dogged pace with utensils and what I imagined to be a tribal tonic or something equally as dubious. The maddening clamor of her ministrations came paused, however, a few moments later and I liberated a sigh from the depths of my chest. I had reclaimed my hands from the frost and muscled my way through the sensational lethargy that took them afterward.

“Did you still want to go over the map?” she asked.

I weighed the ramifications of the honorable response, the one that would most appease the Order and legitimize my navigation of the mountainside. I swallowed dryly upon the fallacy as well as the obligation it entailed; pondered carefully how I would most desire the remainder of the afternoon to transpire, and what I would have to compromise for, ever in the favor of my ideology. I pursed my lips and exhaled gruffly through my nostrils before pivoting on my heel.

“No.” my voice was strained and I lectured myself intrinsically for my folly. My only fault was that I was ambitious and wholly unrepentant for it.

I steeled myself in anticipation of further inquiry, but was pleasantly met only with the crackling simmer of the small licks of flame contained by a roundel of obsidian and gravel. I reclined on the soil, perching one foot before the fire and allowing the other to fall slack beside it and supporting my mass with the palm of one hand. I hooked my chin over the knee of the extended leg and watched the fluid blaze dance over and about itself, relishing in the heat radiating from its golden core. Ziio paced quietly across the squalid ground and eventually ensconced herself beside me, legs folded over one another and petite frame swiveled to face me directly. 

My brow wadded defensively. “You’ve a reason for staring at me, I assume.”

The woman groused incomprehensibly under the veneer of a sigh, skulking toward me on her knees and taking my jaw in her hand. In the other, I noted, she bore a primitive basin and a rent stretch of cloth. She flexed her fingertips against the grain of my jowls and directed my face to her, adjusting her vantage point to better surmise the severity of the raw wounds marring my cheeks. Given a few moments of study, she soaked the cloth in an amalgam of liquid and foliage and applied it to the plane of broken skin. My flesh burned with the immediacy and alarm of manifold pinpricks, but I did not acknowledge it.

She no longer graced my superficial injuries with her honeyed eyes, but deliberately sought my own. Her expression distracted from the detriment and irritability it had once beheld and became inscrutable. I tried in futility to derive rationality and ventured forth a number of centimeters, as though clarity might offer insight. Her busied hand stroked the opposite hemisphere of my face with the medicated fabric poised between us. Between my rampant thoughts and the depleting proximity between the woman and I, I realized my heart had carried off without me. The ceaseless thrum of the loathsome muscle against my chest wracked my entire body, drumming away at my ears and smothering even the subtlest of sounds from attracting my attention.

“Ziio,” I said, deafened.

With the thinnest of movements, she rid us of the decidedly small chasm between our frames. She embraced my neck with the latter of her hands, thumbing gently against my mandible as her lips collided spectacularly with mine.


	2. Breakfast in America

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Disclaimer:** The following characters belong to Ubisoft entertainment. I do not own, nor claim ownership of any of the following.

The invasive stench of burning bread wafted through the pine addled air. The sun’s obstinate light warmed my flesh and permeated my eyes, although they laid sealed in slumber. As I drew nearer and nearer to wakefulness, I heard the menial buzz of domesticity – the polyphonic chaos of conversation, instruction, the clattering of dishes, and the listless underscore of the house band playing a lazy tune of their own invention. I wrinkled my brow in displeasure, but refrained from willing my eyes alive as I clung hopelessly to the fading inertia of sleep. A hoarse groan seeped disdainfully from my chest as I inhaled the scent of linen from the pillow confined betwixt my arms.  
  
I immersed myself into the fray shortly thereafter, having clad and groomed myself accordingly in the inn’s substandard second-floor lavatory. I narrowly evaded being swindled into parlay with the innkeeper’s coquettish wife and navigated the Green Dragon’s unusually crowded foyer with practiced cunning, shoving aside ilk of ill purpose and significance. Scoffing at the extraordinarily poor conduct of a fellow nearest the bar, my attention was entreated by the affably robust voice of a man I recognized to be Charles Lee. I expelled a grateful sigh as I traversed the last of the current of famished men and women alike and took a seat amongst my colleagues.

“Haytham, old boy, it’s good to see you. Did you sleep well?” Charles mused with a rap of my shoulder. 

“Did you sleep at all?” Hickey slurred beneath the guise of a maleficent smirk. I cinched a cautionary brow at the young scoundrel across the table, but he persisted with a guffaw. “I ‘member well enough that you took off for the day while the lot of us was only sleepin’, and nobody saw you come back ‘til the tavern was closin’ for the night. Who’s the broad?”

My fingers retracted instinctively into fists atop the surface of the table, nails scraping against the varnish and my teeth grinding undetectably behind a thoroughly manufactured expression. I watched him for a moment, leering oafishly from the shadow cast by the protruding lip of his cap, and pondered whether it’d be worth the trouble to strike him across the face. I glanced curtly, with a nonchalant sniff, to my ulster sleeve and elected against it. I had very little interest in soiling my clothes with impudent blood so early in the day.

“There isn’t one,” I spoke eventually, steering my gaze warily across the piecemeal bounty placed before me by a woman in employ at the tavern. “I traveled to the native camp just north of Lexington yesterday. I had planned to spend the daylight hours there, hence my leaving so early and returning so late. That’s not to mention the god awful snowstorm I had to fight through.”

“Perfectly fair, I’d say. Traversing those woods even in comely weather is somethin’ of a gamble.” A nearly jollily complacent William Johnson added from the cavernous innards of his mug, the remnants of a grin lousing about his face. Pitcairn, at the head of the table and already enthralled and knuckle deep in his gruel, nodded with a gamey snort of what I had interpreted to be corroboration.

The rather spacious lobby was burdened with reputation and therefore infested with people at all hours of the day, save for the obligatory afternoon drought. Unending was the sound of the compendium, cohabitating as they were. The whole building now reeked of evidence of a negligent cook, and a roomful of people spoiled themselves with the same scalded bread and salted cod that stared daringly up at me from a fissured porcelain plate. I pressed my lips against one another in contempt of the slipshod meal and opted instead for tea. 

The Green Dragon was far from the ideal quartering facility, but it suited me well enough, so long as I slept heavy and enjoyed my sunrises accompanied by the cacophonous shrieks of the drunken swills perpetually haunting the main floor. I wasn’t much for drink, nor tobacco – taboos of the hands and lips. My aptitude in taking life and preserving my anonymity relied exclusively upon the alertness of my mind, and the lackadaisical disorient of inebriation mired and repulsed me. The same, as I had observed, could not have been said of my allies, but I did not judge them harshly for their erring.

Hickey’s voice overshadowed the horrid buzz of the public and I referred my attention thus. “You say ‘Perfectly fair,’ like there ain’t a woman. Just because he popped in on the reds doesn’t mean he didn’t have his way. You find a squaw you fancy?”

I bit back a scurrilous string of words with a disdainful chuckle. “When I said ‘There isn’t a woman’, Hickey, I _meant_ there isn’t a woman.”

“Ziio’s a player in our lobby against Braddock. Don’t be vulgar, Thomas.” Charles’ contribution to the unfortunate exchange was volleyed between sputters of incredulous laughter.

“Oh, she has a name!” Hickey exclaimed after a swig of the ale primed in his left hand. “’Tio’, the buxom barbarian a’ the forest. Haytham, I almost didn’t take you for the kind.”

“’ _Ziio_ ’.” I corrected through the miniscule bridge between my teeth.

The man’s overbearing brow furrowed in humored bafflement, his filthy face falling, but the vile smirk lingering on his alcohol soured lips. “What’s it matter what ‘er name is? Do you _want_ to bed the thing?”

I did not distract from my imposing glare, but I felt Charles glance in uncertainty between me and the others. I steepled my fingers mildly upon the table, silently and undiscernibly imagining how simplistic a conquest it would be to reach across the table and behead the nuisance in the midst of his ill-conceived rabble rousing. Johnson had cried out in protest the moment we were to be blanketed by silence whilst Hickey cackled on. Charles pitched in meagerly, as moderate men are liable to do, if given some incentive. Fearful of confrontation, Pitcairn rasped a query regarding the whereabouts of our local contact, Benjamin Church, and received no response. Being him a fairly intelligent man, I’m certain he had foreseen it. 

“What in God’s name did _I_ do? It’s a fuckin’ _savage_ we’re talking about!” Hickey shouted, condescension etched across his lopsided simper.

“She!” Johnson roared in retort, his baritone thrusting our region of the pub into a state of unease. Perhaps he was too engrossed in his argument – a compassionate man with a great deal of sympathy for those deserving, and still many unfit for the charity that was his boundless empathy – to notice the feeble and gradual retreat of the bar occupants about us, else I am confident he’d have kept his peace and encouraged his civil opponent to do the same. “ _She_ is a person, just like all the rest! Yer welcome to your opinions, no matter how shite they are for true, but I won’t have you treatin’ people like _things_ in my company.”

“What’re you goin’ on about? Y’don’t even know the broad!”

Charles stood from his seat and lobbed himself onto the other end of the table. He shunted between the two men with one arm bent at the elbow, the other extended to repel one of them by the chest. “Thomas, William, _please_! Lower your voices, take your seats and kindly let these fine people enjoy their food, eh?”

A few objections were hoisted about in the whirlwind writhing between Hickey and Johnson, but it dispersed within a few moments and we all abided by Charles’ scandalous proposition of neutrality for the remainder of the morning. The lad attempted conversation once or twice, but only Pitcairn was ubiquitous enough in sangfroid to carry it to fruition. I shook my head and excused myself from the proceedings after pouring tea for Johnson, his hands having been unsteadied by the untarnished wrath pulsating through his veins and reinvigorated by every half-note thump of his heart. I nodded to my colleagues with a rigid frown before absconding to the stairwell with no intention of coming back.

Contrary to Hickey’s brazen and largely satirical allegations, I did not rob Ziio of her virtue the day before. I recalled vividly the touch of her skin against mine and the resplendent ambiance of the humbly flickering fire, the tranquil cadence of the tribal drums and the deviations of the low, gentle mewls fleeing her lips. Every movement she made was thoughtful, bleeding with sincerity, but not hesitant. Her fingertips roamed across my jaw and neck and she had caught my gaze with the widest and most inquisitive brown eyes as she parted from me, head downcast and scrutiny tilted to the heavens. I could do nothing but stare at her in those few fragile moments before we struck one another again. 

Our lips melded and her hands caressed either sides of my face. I splayed my fingers across her waist and marveled inwardly at the size of my hands in comparison to her frame. I tugged her close and rejoiced in the flavor of her lips, the approach and regression of her heaving chest against mine, the sensation of her feverish flesh beneath my unclad hands. The sun had dipped just below the tree line and the sky was engulfed by pallid streaks of orange and scarlet when she advised I take leave. I agreed, and made no effort to uproot myself from the ground, nor her from atop me. She delved in close but did not kiss me again, touching her forehead to my brow and her nose to mine. Her eyes fell closed but still I observed, enamored beyond reason. She curled her fingers idly against my chin in farewell and I forced myself to leave her.

The gentle, intimate memories incited the growth of an interminable smile across my face. I ran the battle trodden underside of my palm across my forehead in the shadow of a vacantly congenial sigh and placed the quill on its side on the desktop. I dug my heels into the floor and left the wooden chair beside the davenport, padding slowly toward the bed. My fingers closed carefully around the reflective brass radius of the first of the buttons binding my coat to my form and succeeded in relieving me of a few before my fixations meandered to the window adjacent me. 

My adept vision was hampered only by the ebony geometric silhouettes of the rooftops miring the skyline, but beyond the buildings, canopies, and scaffolds, I sought solace in the muted wane of the tide. Smearing the tempered waves were the tall and imposing molds of ships, sea faring vassals of the genteel, bobbing to and from Great Britain on the malleable back of the ocean. Gradually, my fingers halted in their efforts and drew along my front until falling slack at my sides. I took a step toward the window and watched as a massive cargo vessel disengaged the Boston harbor and lazily began to turn about on its axis, the hull piercing the thin veil of fog engulfing the very surface of the water. Preceding the ship were a modest fleet of schooners and sloops, spearheaded by a single, outwardly identical cargo ship to that of the last one to emigrate from port. Minutes passed and eventually all of the crafts began to shrink into the sliver of incandescence lapping at the horizon like the swell upon the briny shore. I watched the convoy surrender to the oblivion of the Atlantic and, as my thoughts withdrew back to Ziio and the velveteen consistency of her voice against my ear and her flesh upon my flesh, I had no desire to be among them.


	3. I Am Not a Stranger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Disclaimer:** All of the characters in the proceeding piece are copyrighted in entirety to Ubisoft. I do not own, nor claim ownership of anything.

I combed the coast with a strict glower, tapered brow clinching snug in opposition of the probing streams of sunlight pealing through the gaps in the abundant foliage overhead. A reflex and indifferent scowl marred my hardened countenance in shallow defense against the mystique of the innermost throes of the frost dusted woodland. In the same instance, I was intimidated and frightfully fascinated by the utterly alien realm I had voluntarily disturbed. My head swiveled promptly at the pitchy caw of a distant fowl and again at the unsettling chorus of rustling underbrush and the petrified corpses of felled leaves, twigs, and parched soil and snow upheaved in the same vein of wind.  
My nostrils flared as the gale tore along the embankment and ravaged my exposed skin, sweeping the sable locks strewn across my shoulder into the air and against my cheek. I cracked the reins woven intricately between my digits and my steed jerked violently into gallop along the beach, its feral shriek distressing the orchestrated bedlam of the forest. I cursed the lake’s tranquility beneath my breath as I approached it – a gargantuan mountain sewn with snowcapped evergreens and accompanied by a slew of indiscriminant white foothills, branching from the peak and avalanching into a stagnant freshwater pool.

A buck planted along the water’s edge glanced up at me before frantically bulleting back into the trees. Its husky grunt and the clamor of its hooves through the thinning snow against the grit of the forest floor instigated another earthy symphonic. In moments, the weald erupted with the reverberations of evasive fauna, clambering, clawing, sprinting, flying and fleeing the waterfront. The communal cries of the native creatures thundered the grove and exploded into the air, discord and enchantment echoing throughout my immediate surroundings until vanishing into silence and finality. I had decelerated the anxious horse to a languorous trot as we traversed the sand, enthralled and challenged by the disastrous calm.

I wandered into the winding entrails of the forest with the hedonistic purpose of seeing Ziio again. I had agonized quietly over the prospect for days, reliving the embrace we’d shared countless times and dissecting every second for meaning. I had embarked upon a number of excursions with Lee and the others in an attempt to appease the self-imposed debt that had metastasized upon my conscience, and whilst my hands forged alliances and claimed lives, my thoughts were zealous entirely to the enigmatic glimmer in the savage beauty’s eyes and the mild twinge of her lips, cast eternally in neither a smile nor a frown. As much as the idea intimidated and perplexed me, I pined for the tine of her decadent voice and the argumentative jilt of her brow. I left the Green Dragon the moment the memory of her kiss began to pale.

I had shifted my gaze to the water, watching the shuddering refraction of the sun creep along its corrugated surface as I evaluated my own thoughts. I was enabling a demoniac fantasy in my ceaseless pursuit of the young Mohawk woman. For every traitorous instant the depths of my mind were ailed with her name, her visage, the garbled memories of her breath against my lips, the motives of the Order were deprived of me. I closed my fingers around the amulet strung about my neck and tautened my jaw. I was wasting time and energy, and I was frightened by how little I cared.

The carnal jostling of tree limbs and desiccated vegetation distracted my listless line of sight and I instinctively reached for my pistol. Upon turning to determine the cause of the disarray, index finger fixed upon the trigger, the pine nearest the curvature of the valley into the lakebed rustled vehemently before me. My brows pinched cautiously and I wrought my lips against one another. From the writhing and hoary nettles emerged a small, hunched creature, coated in coarse russet fur. I craned my neck in an attempt to identify the beast and it hurled itself against the mounds of intermingled soil, snow, and grass, propelling violently toward me with a strange and vengeful snarl. I exhaled soberly and pulled the trigger.

My active hand was jammed suddenly into the air, the bullet harmlessly rupturing the air with a thunderous roar. I glanced urgently to my manipulated arm with the underdeveloped beginnings of protest welling in my throat and before I could cast my eye upon the monster in my midst, I was overpowered by the untarnished momentum that it had accrued in its haste. I heard my horse wail in fright and trample off in a wild trajectory as I tumbled from the saddle, yelping. Water expanded all around me, seeped into the fabric adorning my figure and took amorphous shape briefly in the air before surrendering itself to the pool once more. My eyes were and my veins pulsated blaringly beneath my skin and I beheld the creature with a startled grunt. Before I could make sense of the situation, I produced a blade from beneath my coat sleeve with a capricious gesticulation of my wrist and clamped one hand around the creature’s throat, warding it from my face with the debilitating force of my fingers. The serrated edge of a roguish weapon bit triflingly into my neck.

“ _Ziio_?” I probed breathlessly between my warring teeth.

The woman presided over me with an authoritative, conclusive stance – one knee imbedded in my abdomen and the fingers on her subdominant hand knotted in my collar while those on other pressed a knife to my jugular. I was livid and intrigued by her tact. She bore the same bearskin pelt she had had when she discovered my horse and I in the brunt of a calamitous blizzard weeks in precedence. As she grimaced down at me, a dramatic arch in her brow and the teeming of sacrilege in her native dialect on her tongue, I don’t think I’d ever found her so beautiful. She wrenched me forth and I tightened the grip I established on her larynx.

“What is _wrong_ with you?” she wheezed domineeringly against my fingers.

“I daresay I should ask the same of you.” She jerked the blade deeper into my skin, likely displeased by the composure of my tone. 

“You chased them away.” She choked.

“The animals?” I shirked from her momentarily, puzzlement contorting my face unsavorily. “That was hardly my fault.”

The evanescent sheen of her eyes in the sunlight all but disappeared as they diminished into lucid slats, rueful and severe. Blood dribbled from the expanding perforation of my flesh, but I cleared my throat resolutely against her imminent and eager spear. I drew my hand to her cheek and halted just before brushing my fingers against the copper skin that lay there, pressing the fine tip of a hidden blade against her neck. A growl churned low in her chest.

“Let me up,” my voice was hushed and sternly politic. “And we will talk.”

Given a moment of deliberation, the young woman disposed of her weapon and I dislodged my fingertips from her esophagus. She retreated to her toes, turned gruffly from me, and pulled the thick hide further over her bare shoulders while tending to her throat with her hands. She rivaled the coast with increasing footsteps as I rose from the shallows and surveyed the state of my attire. I was sodden with residual run-off from the towering cliff side, filthy with the grime and grain of the lakebed’s bottom and I mourned my cloak with a fleeting groan. I disregarded the wounded plea of my skin, rent asunder, and instead strode after the object of my intent.

“Where in blazes are you going?” I rather stated, than inquired. “I said we were going to talk.”

She did not look at me as I impeded her step, shoulders squared and spine erected, only pressed a palm to my upper torso. I was conscious of the rapidity of my heartbeat, and slightly alarmed that she’d detect it as well. I observed anticipatorily as her chest expanded and deflated promptly, as though she’d devoured the words that inhabited her maw. Her fingertips flexed almost undetectably against the ornate material embellishing my body and she remained quiet for a few more moments.

“How did you find me?” she suddenly said, ostensibly angry, and yet her hand remained.

“I asked about you at the camp, and one of your men pointed me here.”

“They failed to mention I was hunting?”

I sighed. “They did not.”

Ziio tilted her head up at me, a reproachful scowl distorting her flawless physiognomy. Foundationless words roiled at the back of my throat, contingent upon abating her fury, but never matured beyond guttural utterances. She wielded all the force that her petite frame could muster through her hands and shoved past me and into the brush. I lingered on my heels for a moment, arms sprawled and fingers fringed, before eventually giving chase. 

Her body maneuvered fluidly through the outlaying limbs of threadbare greenery speckling the forest floor, contorting and constricting at once and sometimes not at all. She coexisted fecklessly with her world; swept her feet in tempo with the frostbitten wail of the wind and conformed her gait to the intricate design of the briar. The lengthy stretch of fur reamed across her shoulders hove heftily about her naked legs, stringing along in the snow and accenting her tracks. I was wiser than to replicate the deft and airy lilt of her steps and instead carved my way through nature’s caravansary, blade brandished at my wrist.

“If you’d only let me speak to you-” I relayed tersely as I swiped the dehydrated extremity off of an obtrusive shrub.

“You have spoken enough.”

I glared, although I was not graced with her veneer. “If I may, I’d like to ask something of you.”

“Then you may not.” she spouted cursorily over her shoulder.

The woman ceased her brief journey at the base of a towering pitch pine. The tree was gnarled and saturated nearest the snow plagued ground, bits of softened flesh dangling weakly from the trunk and cluttering the ivory mounds of slush that covered the perimeter. She stared firmly up into the malformed, barren limbs compacted between those of neighboring copses and foliage, and therefore transmuted into something of a grotesque cluster of bark, mangled talons and the thick layers of ice that enshrouded them all. I watched her for a moment as she studied the unsightly thing, face vacant of the perturbation that had so afflicted her. She was enthralled only by her impenetrable focus as I flanked her composedly and drove my stout sabre into the tree’s shaft. I hesitated before touching her, but resolved to take her by the arm and guide her forcefully against the tree’s face.

She writhed in hostility against my hand, but reeled her eyes to mine instead of instigating another row. Her teeth grated loathsomely behind a panicked yelp and I leaned in, touching my brow to hers. 

I demanded as softly as my jilted temperament would allow. “Talk to me.”

The warmth of her skin radiated unto mine and as we shared that thoughtful, irate gaze, her breath devolved into long-drawn and anxious respites. The dissatisfaction in her frown was palpable. “The men and women of the camp have been working tirelessly - day and night. It is winter and everything is dead, the hunt scarce. They require food and _I_ must retrieve it. _Let_ me.”

“I’m afraid I can’t.” I witnessed the anger flood her features and was ensnared by her stare.

“You _can_.”

“You’re absolutely correct,” I proffered with the understated degree of decorum, “I am completely capable of releasing you, but you see, I’ve made that mistake before. You took off like a rabid animal into the trees and I very nearly lost you. This time you’ve ambushed and subsequently injured me, frightened my horse off into the wild, and adamantly refuse to humor me with a simple conversation. This really isn’t a matter of whether or not I _can_ let you go free, but rather if I _will_. And at present, your odds are unfavorable.”

She rolled her eyes dismissively. “The horse will return if he is trained well, and your cut will heal.”

“And what of the talk?”

“Are we not talking now?”

I unhinged my jaw, glancing temporarily away from the infuriating woman before returning my gaze and reinforcing my scowl. “You know very well what I mean.”

She said nothing. I was conjured nearer.

“The last we met,” I murmured scornfully against her ear after angling my face appropriately, “You took me in your arms and kissed me, unprovoked. Why?”

“I was curious.” She responded brusquely. 

I felt her move against my skin, the bridge of her nose nudging against my cheek. I gulped strenuously on the stifling notch in my throat. I was tempted to match her efforts with my own, but my nerve endings spiked and my appendages stiffened, my muscles taut and confined by my frigid flesh. Her errant lips stirred against my jowl and expelled a slew of words I did not comprehend, although the cadence set me ill at ease. I ushered myself back into awareness when I recognized my name, laden and sugared by her voice.

“ _Haytham_ ,” she whispered frenetically. I wrinkled my brow at the frantic nature of her tone and the stalwart tug of her little fingers against my waistcoat. “Haytham, turn around and brace yourself.”

I parted my lips to contest her deliberate instruction, but the resonation of a bovine snort squelched the sentiment before it was born. I swiveled my gaze conscientiously beyond the woman before me and over the breadth of my shoulder when the cold air I inhaled hitched in my throat. My eyes broadened in much the same time as my deportment as I broke the haughty gaze between Ziio and the wooly titan behind me. It paved a portent rift in the snow with the gnarled ridge of its massive hoof, a gust of vapor spewing free of its engorged nostrils and masking its fearsome long face. Two convoluted calcium tusks sprouted from either margin of its skull, jutted laterally, and speared the air with mettlesome and misshapen prongs. The thing was immense with its hefty head pointed squarely at my back and a wrathful grunt burdened on its snout.

“What in god’s name is that?” I mumbled in awe.

“ _Atena:ti_ ,” she answered and adopted a discreetness of voice.

Without delay, I dislodged my blade with one short and powerful jerk of my arm and rotated on one foot to combat the creature. My arms were spread territorially, in much the same fashion as the _atena:ti_ ’s hind legs and antlers. As I skirted the slight clearing, its eyes and body followed, shoulder blades further flexing, hiking. I risked a foolishly intrepid glimpse at the tree trunk, only to watch as Ziio clambered along its length and into the haven offered by its bizarre branches. I growled spitefully against a frown as I willed my fixations back unto the bovid goliath rearing for attack. Within seconds, the beast released an extraordinarily canine shriek before it rushed me, startlingly swift and forceful beyond my range of understanding. Its savage cry rumbled the icy earth compressed beneath its rolling hooves and the stagnant soles of my boots. 

Impulsively, I kicked my own feet from beneath me and allowed myself to collapse unto the ground. Freezing as it was, I permitted the impetus of the abrupt movement to push my body forth amongst the small knolls of ice until it inevitably halted. My lungs inflated rapidly in response to the adrenaline fueling the race of my heart and the dilation of my pupils. I plunged my dagger heartily into the belly of the beast as it lay indefensible to my siege, raking my wrist along with minor injunctions, given the meaty composition just beneath its hardy flesh. Its agonized and angry rejoinder flooded the air and I reprehended the residual spatter of blood upon my face and already stained outer clothes. In the beast’s lamentation, I scrambled back to the base of the tree, hyperactive pulse quaking my frame and silencing reality. I yielded my weapon just beneath the fret of my fingers and watched readily as the creature trampled wrathfully about before facing me again. 

It rallied unto its haunches and swung its mighty fore legs in the air before slamming them into the dirt and the filth and the snow. Meaningless moments elapsed before it was sneering and careening ferociously toward me once more and I planted my feet, blade flaunted proudly and a daring leer upon my face. The imposing barbs of its horns invaded my vision and defied the hungry tug of my tendons against the bone until quite suddenly, they did not. From a leafless egress in the canopy above, burst the body of a significantly smaller mongrel, swathed in a cape of furs and emanating a feminine call that ricocheted from tree to tree. The creature landed atop the _atena:ti_ and wrung its slender arms about its neck, steering it free of my position. It lurched abruptly toward the unsettled earth and carried its concluded prey down with it. The larger of the beasts belted out a colossal screech of pain before its adversary unsheathed a manmade dirk and promptly buried it into the broader side of its neck, eliciting a geyser of blood from a sizeable and severed sinew. Crimson rained from the fresh wound onto the cloak of its foe and the _atena:ti_ ’s howls diminished along with the shimmer of life in its big black eyes. From the mound of fur, flesh, and bloodied snow rose the distinctive and enticing frame of a woman that soon turned to face me.

“Z-Ziio,” I managed against the ragged pang of my heart to my chest.

“Thank you.” She said with a smile.


End file.
